Apart from appeals for rehabilitation, the regime had other reasons for concern about GULAG. Above all, this prison empire became increasingly volatile, with frequent and violent disorders. The most famous, at ‘Gorlag’ (Norilsk) in 1953, required a military assault that left more than a thousand prisoners dead. Insurrections also exploded at Steplag (1954), Kolyma (1955), and Ozerlag (1956). More important, the ‘corrective labour’ system was anything but corrective: rates of recidivism were shockingly high. According to one study (April 1956), 25 per cent of current prisoners were former inmates. But such results were inevitable for a system manned by people with abysmally low professional standards: three-quarters of the camp administrators did not even have a secondary education. The size and complexity of GULAG also militated against better results. The population of camps and prisons (2,472,247 on 1 January 1953) declined after the Beria amnesty, but then increased sharply. On 1 January 1956 the prisons held 1.6 million inmates (with another 150,000 in transit or under investigation); GULAG’s 46 corrective labour camps and 524 labour colonies held another 940,880 people (including 113,739 guilty of ‘counter-revolutionary activity’). In short, initial measures had barely altered the Stalinist prison-camp system; it was the Twentieth Party Congress that would open the floodgates for rehabilitation and reform.
Twentieth Party Congress (1956)
The first such assembly since Stalin’s death, the Twentieth Party Congress was a watershed in the political history of modern Russia. It sought to revitalize the party by including many new faces, not only among the 1,349 voting delegates, but also in the leadership: roughly half of the
But the bombshell exploded unexpectedly on 24 February when delegates were summoned to an unscheduled, late-night speech by Khrushchev behind closed doors. His speech on ‘the cult of the personality and its consequences’, a text of 26,000 words requiring four hours for delivery, offered a devastating account of Stalin’s crimes after Kirov’s murder in December 1934. It presented shocking statistics on the number of party members, congress delegates, and military leaders who perished in the 1930s amid ‘mass violations of socialist legality’. The report also blamed Stalin for catastrophic mistakes in the Second World War, for the mass deportation of entire peoples, and for other crimes after the war. By suggesting that the cult appeared after collectivization and industrialization (which were thus not called into question), Khrushchev sought to distinguish between Stalin’s crimes and Soviet achievements and to uphold the principle that ‘the true creators of the new life are the popular masses led by the Communist Party’. The main thrust of the speech was incorporated in a Central Committee resolution of 30 June 1956 ‘On Overcoming the Cult of the Individual and its Consequences’.
By then the rehabilitation process was already in high gear. The regime advised investigatory commissions that many convictions were based on un-proven accusations or ‘confessions obtained through the use of illegal methods of investigation’. Nevertheless, it exempted whole categories from rehabilitation: ‘nationalists’ in Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Baltics who had fought against the Soviet Union during the war as well as those ‘who were really exposed as traitors, terrorists, saboteurs, spies and wreckers’. To accelerate the process, a party commission was sent to interview political prisoners and judge whether they should be released. The undertaking was enormous, involving more than one hundred thousand ‘counterrevolutionaries’. According to a report from 15 June 1956, authorities had already released 51,439 prisoners (including 26,155 politicals) and reduced the sentences for another 19,093. Although restricted to cases initiated after 1935 (on the specious grounds that ‘mass violation of individual rights’ commenced only then), by 1961 rehabilitation gradually enveloped a large number of Stalin’s victims, including half of the politicals who had been executed.
